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Most of us don't think of Microsoft when our thoughts turn to open source. This is probably because the company's main products, Windows and Office, are so far from open that just thinking about them probably violates their user agreement.. But wait! says Olivier Bloch, Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., we have lots and lots of open source around here. Look at this. And this and this and even this. Lots of open source. Better yet, Olivier works for Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., not directly for the big bad parent company. Watch the video or read the transcript, and maybe you'll figure out where Microsoft is going with their happy talk about open source. (Alternate Video Link)

Timothy
Lord: So Olivier, a lot of people certainly do not associate
Microsoft with open source very much, particularly at OSCON, and
you’re an open source evangelist.

Olivier
Bloch: I’m...

Tim:
How does that work?

Olivier:
I work for Microsoft Open Technologies, which is a wholly-owned
subsidiary of Microsoft, working and bridging the Microsoft world and
non-Microsoft world, working with open source communities and open
standards. So it’s all about finding the right standards,
making open source software run on Windows, run on the Microsoft
Azure Cloud. And it’s also about making sure that when there is
IP, there’s something that Microsoft could be open source, that
we work on that and open source these technologies.

Tim:
What are some examples of things from Microsoft that have been
open sourced?

Olivier:
A great example actually is WinJS. WinJS is JavaScript Library for
Windows, that’s been designed for Windows apps to be developed
with JavaScript. It provides graphical UI controls. It also provides
data binding and other functionalities, that are proper to Windows in
the beginning, but it happens to be that this technology can be used
today because it’s open source on browsers for websites that
can also be combined with Apache Cordova to make cross platform
mobile applications using WinJS. That’s one of the examples of
the big technology that is part of the core of the Windows app
platform that’s been open sourced, so that it could go across
platforms and help developer who use the exact same code and their
own skills across the various existing platforms out there and we’re
learning a lot and the objective is to actually accept contributions
in that project and at the end of day these contributions will make
it into the next version of Windows because that’s the same
project that goes internally and externally, that’s the idea of
that open sourcing of WinJS.

Tim:
How do you keep things like licenses, open source licenses often
they play certain restrictions on what you can redistribute, how do
you reconcile things like closed source and open source and one
eventual software package?

Olivier:
Yeah. I think there’s from that perspective not being a lawyer,
my perspective as a developer regarding that. The licenses are you
know stating what the conditions are for using the code or whatever
and so each time we look into them and say we can, we can’t or
we want to know what, so it depends, so each time actually I don’t
think there is a “a” license for open source, that’s
my personal perspective. Each of them have their you know own
perspective and own goals. At Microsoft Open Technologies being a
wholly-owned subsidiary, we have that flexibility of being able to
look into more things and interact with open source community. That
doesn’t mean that Microsoft product groups cannot do the same
thing, they can and actually they’re doing that. They are
really looking into, hey, should we contribute to that open source
project, will that help developers know developing for Windows. And
if that’s the case, they go through the legal process of
looking into the licenses. If that works for that specific group, for
that specific project, then they go for it and you know that’s
pretty about looking into licenses what they say and what they can
and cannot do with that.

Tim:
Do you find there’s a whole new culture that it takes
within Microsoft to integrate open source?

Olivier:
I think overall the culture is definitely evolving and following what
the actual real reward is about and openness is one of the reality of
the business today and it’s not just about using open source
actually. I like what I like is the fact that we’re moving
towards a place where we are also as Microsoft and as Microsoft Open
Technologies looking into what are the right ways to open source that
IP, that technology, to make sure that developers can build the apps
they want to build and we’re still not in a position where we
deliver the right tools, the right technologies to have great apps at
the end of the day and if that’s about open sourcing some
technologies like WinJS, let’s do it. That’s what’s
the best for developers. Well, let’s go through that and let’s
do it. Is that a radical change at Microsoft, I think it’s a
progressive change, it’s happening, it’s like you know
that’s what the industry is about today, so.

Tim:
How about licenses, are they licenses that you favor, if you’re
encouraging someone within Microsoft to perhaps to work on an open
source project, otherwise you would encourage as the ones that most
bridge the gap between the current and the potential?

Olivier:
As I mentioned earlier, I think there is no one license that actually
could fit all needs and as a matter of fact that we each time look
into what is the right choice, because that specific communities
using a specific license are just like, okay, why ask them to change
that work for us, let’s contribute using that license. When it
comes to open sourcing Microsoft code, we have different examples of
different licenses used. The Apache v2 one seems to be one that is
actually one working really well for us but there are other examples
where we were leasing under different licenses and whether they are
the Microsoft PL1 or the MIT or whatever, I think it’s all
about really working with the community and it’s not about
changing people’s habits, it’s about really finding what
really works and what you see adequate and a license in that
particular case for this particular community.

Tim:
One last question, how pervasive is open source development now
within the Microsoft culture?

Olivier:
As of today I can’t say because it’s something that is
like going on right now and what I realize, what I see that as the
Microsoft Open Technology, as being part of the Microsoft Open
Technology group, we are standing for excellence when it comes to
open sourcing, when it comes to using open source and so of course
when it comes to engaging with the communities and we are getting a
lot of asks internally from various product groups, various developer
teams, they’re asking us, okay guys, so how do we do that,
what’s going on, what do we need to be careful about, what can
we do, what can’t we do, so it has been something where there
has been a process for long time at Microsoft to do open source and
to utilize open source. I think it’s getting simpler, it’s
getting also clearer because we are in the culture of developing in
general and our developers they are coming from various domains,
various areas and they are coming with their experiences, their
desire to use things they have been using somewhere else. And so,
yeah the culture is shifting and I see that’s in that contact
from the product teams into MS Open Tech asking us about our
consultancy related to open source.

Seriously why do you so badly need Microsoft to be the epitome of evil so you can get angry about it? Sure if you really need to be angry about it I'm sure you can easily find plenty of things they do to fixate upon, there is no shortage of those and you dont even have to look to the past to find them. No company is ever going to be perfect so you don't have to worry that you'll run out of companies to be angry at for some reason or other. Add to that Microsoft's influence in personal computing (given that

Seriously why do you so badly need Microsoft to be the epitome of evil so you can get angry about it?

It's not that. Well, it is for some, but at the same time they've for a long time acted predictably duplicious and reprehensible that the pavlov reflex of disbelief is actually justified by past performance.

(given that personal computing has moved away from traditional PCs)

Not a given, actually. But we have poetterix that is trying and succeeding to be the new micros~1, and in fact now a much more immediate threat to our precious code purity.

Don't try to suppress information just because reality conflicts with your fantastical world view.

Suppress? The summary is very clearly gushing slashvertisement where quite a few don't think of this as warranted, much less earned.

someone, with their head in the sand for the past 20 years, is drinking too much MS-Koolaid for sure. Generally, Microsoft's open source lab or whatever they are calling it today has been all about training someone to move into marketing and develop material and methods to fight customer migrations to open source. They have a long history of this and because they would be DOA without Windows in the market, they can not afford to let or promote any kind of open source which does not lock vendors into Windows.

Their history has been so filled with attacks on open source and open standards to believe anything they say. It's all marketing all the time.

I agree.
Lets start with An Open Letter to Hobbyists [blinkenlights.com] by our good ol pal, William Henry Gates III from the date of Feb, 3 1976. Thirty eight years later and the mentality at Microsoft hasn't really changed much. Let's not forget the Halloween Documents [wikipedia.org] back from 1998. How can we forget the Initiave for Software Choice [cnet.com] led by our friends at Microsoft back in 2002. Dare anyone to forget the Microsoft Get the Facts [techhive.com] campaign? Or how about Microsoft messing with OLPC [captaincodemonkey.com]. How about the recent attempt at making us t

The parent company says open source is "a cancer".The subsidiary he works for says open source is what MS does, sign a NDA and you can see the documentation.Also, the subsidiary says, open source is when MS buys a trade group to have their patented format voted as a standard.

Clearly that's just something you heard about and are parrotting without understanding, so I will educate you: 13 years ago, then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer described "Linux" as a cancer. In actuality what he went on to describe was the GNU GPL and its provisions that including GPL'd code with other code requires that other code to be licensed under a GPL-compatible license. That is an entirely valid critique with a slip/misunderstanding that led to a

PS, you are correct that he's a major shareholder. He controls more shares than Bill Gates, enough to swing any shareholder vote, thereby giving him de facto control of the board of directors and the company.

He went on about it for a while, so it's not a case of mispeaking, of saying the wrong word. When he said commercial companies aren't allowed to use open source software, I think he meant exactly what he said. That's a lie, of course, but it certainly seems he knew what he was saying.

A vote might well go 48% - 52% or something like that. BallmeBallmeer can swing it from 48/52 to 51/49. Ballmer's 3% share is enough to swing many, if not most, votes.

It could really happen in part at least. If MSN were to be split out of M$ then MSN could pursue the coolness of FOSS as part of a marketing drive to more effectively and directly challenge Google. There is no reason a separate and independent MSN should stick with windows and office product and instead pursue service and support of FOSS products and of course us it internally in order to promote it's skills and coolness eternally.

you forget... it'll never be released. Its job is to garner support, "hearts and minds" and then get all the best bits subsumed into the core of Microsoft closed-source products where you'll never see it again.

then Roslyn will not be needed, can be left to die while they produce another open source project.

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infring

Correct.... and ultimately... the reason for all their Open Source efforts is to promote the flagship closed source software such as Windows and IIS and help keep developers on their platform; they don't want popular "The Open Source Momvement" to mean that people who are onboard have to leave their closed expensive platforms.

" but nobody says that open source has to be an entirely altruistic affair." Heresy. Around here we seldom use OSS unless we are talking about World War II, we always use FOSS and nobody pays for anything because Star Trek.

...and yet, all of Microsoft's flagship products, AFAIK, are the polar opposite of open source. If Microsoft truly thought anything of open source, this should not be the case.

That's a very absolutist viewpoint, by that logic if you though anything of open source the core components of your computer(s) would be open source hardware and you would run nothing but open source software. Some people fail to understand that you can be a supporter of an ideology without being an absolutist.

While MS is the company that everybody who ever liked MacOS or Linux loves to hate, it's been a long time since they've been actively hostile to open source, and they contribute quite a bit to it. Frankly it's been a long time since I've seen a good reason to dislike them any more than any other corporation in an adversarial relationship with a product I like.

While MS is the company that everybody who ever liked MacOS or Linux loves to hate, it's been a long time since they've been actively hostile to open source, and they contribute quite a bit to it.

You mean by charging royalties on code they don't own?

Frankly it's been a long time since I've seen a good reason to dislike them any more than any other corporation in an adversarial relationship with a product I like.

You mean, now that google fails at their own "don't be evil" credo, micros~1 must be ok again?

They managed to squander any and all trust they might have had (gain a solid rep the other way, in fact), and recovering from that takes a long time and much more effort than a yearly dress up party complete with "look us, we're so pretty" press release.

Anyone who "trusts" any large corporation is foolish at best, if you're describing the moral sense of the word. The only thing you can "trust" is for a corporation to do what's best for its own survival and bottom line. For the most part, especially in today's information-rich world, most companies - at least those who don't have government-sanctioned monopolies like many ISPs and cable providers - understand that pissing off large numbers of customers is pretty bad for business.

> it's been a long time since they've been actively hostile to open source

Here is an alphabetical list for you just regarding the ooxml, just so that you understand the scale of the problem:http://techrights.org/ooxml-abuse-index/

It is hard to prove anything. But why would poor countries vote against free solutions. Why would small companies do a study that looks like FUD and makes Microsoft products look better compared to open source?

OOXML and the continued, though as yet unactioned, threat of patents over Linux both come to mind.

Microsoft is still every bit as evil as it once was. The chief difference between now and the 1990s is that its market, at least on the consumer side, is shrinking. For now that means they're forced to live with major open source projects like Linux, but I refer you back to Ballmer's patent threats. If it really goes down to the wire, you don't think Microsoft would try to litigate Linux out of existence? After all, we already know it bankrolled SCO's attempts.

Microsoft has never been, nor shall it ever be, a friend to open source. It hates it, fears it, is forced at times to cooperate with it, but you don't think there's a day that goes by that its executive don't wish open source would shrivel up and die?

There's no change in sentiment, simply in ability to act on the sentiment. The mere fact that they're sending out their latest psuedo-FOSSite quisling demonstrates that Redmond is the same as it ever was.

The reason we don't think of MS when it comes to open source is because it is like being reminded of one's evil mother-in-law. You know she's out there, scheming, plotting. You know will have to deal with her one way or another. You know she'd like to steal your soul and sell it straight to Satan.

To be fair, I'd rather be an ethnically-Persian-to-some-degree Jew or Catholic living in Iran than the equivalent in Palestinian controlled Gaza. The Iranians pride themselves on at least paying lip service to tolerating Persian Jews and Christians, as opposed to forming mobs and murdering them. For example, Iran actually has a Jewish member of Parliament. Of course, democratic/representative government there is basically a sham since it's all under the ayatollah.

Exactly. I hope this gets modded up as it was a few years back and some people may never have heard of this. Part of a giant campaign at the time by Microsoft to undermine open source and free software...

...any time Microsoft has tried to pass itself off as reasonable and interoperational, it was a springboard attempt to find out who in the industry wants that from them, and then apply thumbscrews, handcuffs, hookers and blow as required to get those companies to see the world its way. That is, the Microsoft-centric, homogenous and locked-in up to their eyeballs, way.

Never. Ever. Ever. Ever.

EVER.

NEVER EVER trust Microsoft. They are the most self-interested company in the history of companies. Even Oracle looks shiny compared to Microsoft.

Most of us don't think of Microsoft when our thoughts turn to open source. This is probably because the company's main products, Windows and Office, are so far from open that just thinking about them probably violates their user agreement.

Or it might be because of statements like "Linux is a cancer" being made by the company's Chief Executive Monkey. Or the way they bulldozed their substantially-less-than-open MOOXML through when an actual open document format looked like it stood a chance of becoming a sta

Last time I tested several software packages from CodePlex, it required Microsoft Windows and OS locked.NET framework to run. This breaks elegantly with freedom 0 in free software: The freedom to run the program for any purpose. My purpose was to run this software cross platform. Not only using Windows, but also see how it worked on Debian GNU/Linux... It didn't stop there.

The CodePlex applications I installed also added Adware to my different browser on Windows, me having no choice to reject if I would t

The problem for Olivier Bloch, Senior Technical Evangelist and Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. is that they are isolated. The parent company only tells them enough and shows them around enough so that he and others like him can say what they do with a straight face. Meanwhile, the left hand knoweth not what the right hand doth.

I witness this a couple years ago at POSSCON. We had someone that had a similar position at Microsoft give a Keynote. He talked about all the things Microsoft did and everything